Software Developer – ERP Consultant – Avid Reader

System Integration

Business rules and validations related to an automated Business Process are generally hidden deep within the application source code and configuration settings. They are not openly accessible, easily to change or review. They might be duplicated several times across the source code.

Operational Decision Management (ODM) systems try to remedy this situation by providing a central repository for business rules. This repository acts as a single source of truth for users as well as systems. Rules are generally specified in the form of Decision Tables or Trees.

ODM complements BPM (Business Process Management) systems well, as BPM is also metadata driven with a focus on business process workflows and SOA (Serice Oriented Architecture) for integration.

Operational Decision Management for Dummies is a free booklet sponsored by IBM which provides a nice and quick definition of ODM systems. It is recommended for anyone interested in understanding what ODM is, what are its use cases and potential pay offs.

You can also check out this article for some concrete examples on how operational decisions (business rules) are automated by any ODM system.

I had an assignment to rectify the Oracle data replication implementation between multiple Oracle databases connected over a wide area network. The replication was throwing a large number of errors and I needed an efficient tool to monitor the replication process. The standard tool provided by Oracle had certain limitations so I decided to quickly write something which could fill in the gaps. That’s how I got into writing RepMonitor which I am sharing here.

Following are the tasks which can be done more efficiently in RepMonitor than Replication Management Tool that comes with Oracle Enterprise Manager:
1- Search and filter transaction errors by date and other criterias.
2- Load data on-demand only to provide better performance.
2- Generate transaction error reports.
3- Save/Serialize selected transactions and all related info in xml format.

Just to briefly elaborate on point # 2 i.e. loading data on-demand. Oracle Enterprise Manager loads all the transaction error data at start up so if you have a large number of errors, it would take ages to load. Similarly any refresh reloads everything. RepMonitor overcomes these problems by loading data on-demand.